Instructional Strategy: Administration of Injury Scripts

Abstract

Context: Learning how to form accurate and efficient clinical examinations is a critical factor in becoming a competent athletic training practitioner, and instructional strategies differ for this complex task.Objective: To introduce an instructional strategy consistent with complex learning to encourage improved efficiency by minimizing intrinsic cognitive load and effectiveness by emphasizing the development of mental schemas. This strategy, called illness scripts in medicine, was adapted as injury scripts for athletic training.Background: Athletic training students are taught to learn a universal clinical reasoning process for conducting clinical examinations that consists of extensive collecting of patient data and matching these data to a hypothesis, referred to as a hypothetico-deductive approach. This process is burdensome to cognitive load storage capacity and delays development of expertise in diagnostic accuracy.Description: Injury scripts is a clinical reasoning strategy consistent with complex learning, where the evaluation of knowledge and skill competencies or key features of specific conditions are integrated in an incremental, simple-to-complex progression. This strategy will improve learning efficiency and effectiveness. The context in which cases are presented should emphasize real-life scenarios.Clinical Advantage(s): Improved efficiency of student learning and enhanced effectiveness in the professional preparation of knowledge and skills for injury evaluation.Conclusion(s): By integrating evaluation competencies or key features of specific conditions, they can be stored as injury scripts in long-term memory, saving space in working memory and ultimately minimizing intrinsic cognitive load. As students migrate through the curriculum, existing injury scripts will expand by consolidating additional information and effectively prepare them to be competent professionals in clinical examination and diagnosis. Students must also recognize that if specific data collected do not match a script, further analysis is needed to avoid diagnostic error.